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Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

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Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

#121

Post by anonymouskimmer »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #111
UncleMeat wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, he also decided it was appropriate to insult the physical appearance of grad students on twitter who disagreed with him. He definitely didn't come out of covid looking fully dispassionate.

I have no idea what incident you are talking about but, from the context, I have no doubt that it is something inconsequential that social media made a big deal about just to have some reason to be outraged at Ioannidis, with whom they were already outraged.

The commenting on personal appearance took place in a peer-reviewed article in which he was sole author. Read the link.

Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

#123

Post by blacksmith_tb »

dalbasal wrote: post #103
version_five wrote: post #9

I did my PhD in a group with ~20 students and postdocs including many co-supervised with some other department. The prof in charge of the group had his name on > 90% of the papers we published, I believe justifiably. He would have read all of them, and written sections where appropriate, and had a hand in directing and organizing the research as well as challenging the results and strengthening the presentation of th…

Above board, perhaps. This way of researching and publish does, OTOH, mean something quite different from science of the past. This isn't applying the method more efficiently. It's applying a different method. Reading old papers, you know who they were written by. These days, authorship doesn't mean that anymore. It's more like credits in a movie than a signature on a painting.

Don't the credits on a movie imply active participation too? I'd say a closer analogy might be an attendance roll...

Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

#124

Post by NegativeLatency »

dalbasal wrote: post #103
version_five wrote: post #9

I did my PhD in a group with ~20 students and postdocs including many co-supervised with some other department. The prof in charge of the group had his name on > 90% of the papers we published, I believe justifiably. He would have read all of them, and written sections where appropriate, and had a hand in directing and organizing the research as well as challenging the results and strengthening the presentation of th…

Above board, perhaps. This way of researching and publish does, OTOH, mean something quite different from science of the past. This isn't applying the method more efficiently. It's applying a different method. Reading old papers, you know who they were written by. These days, authorship doesn't mean that anymore. It's more like credits in a movie than a signature on a painting.

The nice thing about credits compared to authors is that credits generally have a title/role/position associated with the name. (A grip does a very different job than a costume designer, but with a paper they're all just authors which has a different meaning than say "research director")

Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

#125

Post by sillysaurusx »

borroka wrote: post #118
sillysaurusx wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some examples of papers that have zero value are papers testing hypotheses nobody is interested about I broadly agree with you, but this point is probably mistaken in an illuminating way. The path to breakthrough science sometimes passes through uninteresting work. Few scientists were interested in natural selection before Darwin and his contemporary. There are many other examples.

We are talking about different things. We know about speculative research (which I referred to in my first comments), which gets discovered later on because of new methods, technologies, changes of paradigm. It rarely happens, and it makes a "splash" because it is good narrative and it is unlikely. But it happened, no doubt. I am talking about, just to offer an example, the vast majority of research that is published…

Ah. That makes sense. Thank you for the thoughtful point.

Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

#126

Post by derbOac »

version_five wrote: post #9

I did my PhD in a group with ~20 students and postdocs including many co-supervised with some other department. The prof in charge of the group had his name on > 90% of the papers we published, I believe justifiably. He would have read all of them, and written sections where appropriate, and had a hand in directing and organizing the research as well as challenging the results and strengthening the presentation of th…

I'm glad you felt comfortable with that situation, but not all are like that. Sometimes the involvement is very nominal and unnecessary and there can be unintentional side effects that aren't always obvious, in a form of "attribution manipulation." I can think of situations where a researcher is basically "joining" projects whenever possible to attach their name to it in a form of branding. When a junior person comes along with their own original idea, even without the need of the senior person being involved, if the senior person is on the paper that senior person tends to "suck up" undue credit.

I think sometimes the credit is deserved, but there are times when credit for papers tends to gravitate toward certain individuals who are better at managing public perceptions of citations.

Gravity isn't a bad analogy: people with large citation counts tend to accumulate more, and perceived credit gets taken away from other individuals, even if subconsciously. I think it leads to a grossly distorted idea of how credit is distributed.

I suspect this varies a lot but in my experience these large papers with many many researchers involved authorship is very murky in all sorts of ways. People with prominent authorships might not even deserve to be on the paper at all, and people who are lost in the sea might have actually made a significant contribution.

Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

#127

Post by jarvist »

NegativeLatency wrote: post #124
dalbasal wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Above board, perhaps. This way of researching and publish does, OTOH, mean something quite different from science of the past. This isn't applying the method more efficiently. It's applying a different method. Reading old papers, you know who they were written by. These days, authorship doesn't mean that anymore. It's more like credits in a movie than a signature on a painting.

The nice thing about credits compared to authors is that credits generally have a title/role/position associated with the name. (A grip does a very different job than a costume designer, but with a paper they're all just authors which has a different meaning than say "research director")

It's certainly not perfect (still a bit coarse, doesn't state what % of the work is done, doesn't state which parts of the paper the author worked on), but CRediT statements are gaining increasing traction in the published literature: https://credit.niso.org/

Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

#128

Post by scifibestfi »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #77
NelsonMinar wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What the heck happened to John Ioannidis?" (about his publications during the Covid epidemic.) https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/what-the-heck-happened-to-j...

I think the preamble of the article you linked is important for the consideration of others in opening the link: "John Ioannidis is one of the most published and influential scientists in the world, someone whose skewering of bad medical research we at SBM have frequently lauded over the years. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Since then, Prof. Ioannidis has been publishing dubious studies that minimize the dangers of…

That's a reverse dunk, given that he was proven correct.

Re: Thousands of scientists publish a paper every five days (2018)

#130

Post by [deleted] »

UncleMeat wrote: post #90
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing happened to Ioannidis. He did his job as a scientist and said what he thought was right, even when everybody disagreed with him. So he was wrong? So what? To be a scientist means to blunder a lot. In fact, to be a scientist means to (be willing to) blunder much, much more than everybody else because that is the only way to learn. Science, ultimately, only gives you the tools to know when you're wrong .

Well, he also decided it was appropriate to insult the physical appearance of grad students on twitter who disagreed with him. He definitely didn't come out of covid looking fully dispassionate.

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